Final Battles

Apparently no one in this house is sleeping well this week? I thought I was starting to do okay, but I am getting astonishingly tired. Thursday night I had a dream where I had to do this freerunning sequence to escape getting chomped by Killer Croc so that wasn’t… ideal. And then last night I woke up at like 3 in the morning with intense pain in my guts? Also not fun!

Oh hey, we’re going to talk about Rise of Skywalker a little bit. Some spoilers coming up.

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On Final Battles

You know that bit towards the ends of stories where the main good guy fights the main bad guy and it’s supposed to be big and epic and all? We’re talking about that. It’s been on my mind, in part because of The Rise of Skywalker, but also because I’m wrapping up the sporking of Hounded. Both involve final battles that are hyped up from the beginning of the story. Both of them fall flat.

And there’s a connecting reason why.

[To be clear though, The Rise of Skywalker is a much better movie than Hounded is a book. But there is a similar failing they fall into while doing their final battles. Hounded also happens to have a bunch of other reasons as well, but there is one that it has in common with the recent Star Wars.]

I was going through my Star Wars tags on Tumblr, and I found this gem from Dave Filoni, talking about Ezra Bridger in the animated series Star Wars: Rebels: 

“It makes him different than Luke Skywalker, but it’s not like that’s his super power. The best expression of the Force is not a lightsaber fight or other combat techniques. It’s really about your connection to life, to everything around you, and your ability or willingness to let go, to find peace, and ultimately become a selfless part of existence. Luke Skywalker does not use some special ability to save his father. He trains hard, finds discipline, knowledge, but in the end there is no power that aids him, except the power of compassion and love; the act of forgiveness and apparent self-sacrifice is what saves his father from the dark side. Not a lightsaber fight.”

And I think that encapsulates what a really great final battle or final duel should be about: maybe there are powers involved, but what matters most isn’t which character is more powerful. The hero wins because of playing to a strength he or she has that the antagonist doesn’t. Maybe that’s his willingness to throw down his weapon like Luke Skywalker. Maybe that’s his connection to the wildlife of the galaxy, like with Ezra Bridger. Maybe it’s his ability to outwit everyone else, like Artemis Fowl. Maybe it’s her sheer stubbornness, like with Delilah Dirk. Maybe it’s love for her land and her family, like Tiffany Aching. 

And I think a lot of the really good finales highlight how the villain is beaten by exploiting his weaknesses. The One Ring is destroyed in large part because Sauron’s a doof who designed the Ring to corrupt whoever held it, but never considered that someone might resist it enough to make it to Mount Doom, or that they might fight over it when they got there, or that Hobbits were worth caring about. Voldemort loses his final duel because not just because he doesn’t understand things like love and loyalty, but that he doesn’t even bother to try to understand these things because if it’s beyond him he decides it just straight-up doesn’t matter. And of course, Palpatine is thrown down a giant gaping pit because he underestimates Vader’s reliance on him and how powerful familial love can be.

And that’s not what happens at all in Rise of Skywalker, which ends with Rey getting a power boost from ALL THE JEDI in order to defeat Palpatine, who is ALL THE SITH! Or something. The climax is not Rey acting upon her own character strengths, it’s not built on exploiting the Emperor’s blindness to compassion, it’s just… MOAR POWAH. Yes, the bond between Rey and Ben is an important factor in getting to the final battle, but the actual fight between Rey and Palpatine is a straightforward competition of who can be more powerful.

Hounded has a bit of a similar problem. The book tries to tell us that our lead, Atticus, has been ‘hounded’ by the Irish god Aenghus Og for over two thousand years, which would mean something if the antagonist had a personality, or motivation, or a presence on-page for more than two chapters. And when they do start to fight, Atticus has been given a power boost by another god, and he’s like, “Oh no worries! Turns out that I’m a better duelist than him anyway! He hasn’t learned any new tricks for two thousand years!” Then he cuts off the enemy’s head and that’s that.

No! Absolutely not! I do not care that this is the first book in a series or the author’s debut novel. This is not how you portray stakes, and Kevin Hearne should have known this since he was a high school English teacher!

I’ve seen some critics refer to these sorts of endings as resembling a video game. Which I get: at the end of a video game, you have gained a lot more power and skill than you had at the beginning, and you can use those in a fight. But in a well-done video game, defeating the final enemy should never be easy, and in any case, all those skills and levelling up you did are the result of work. You gained those abilities and learned how to use them over the course of the game.

Rise of Skywalker was largely, I think, the result of a corporation desperately trying to cobble together a movie that would appease everyone and that explains a lot of its questionable narrative decisions. If you don’t have time to write a decent and complex final battle with a villain that has had no presence in the trilogy up until this point, you might as well just pull something out of the Force’s armpit and use it to tie up the Plot with a bow. But that’s not much of an excuse, considering there’s no reason that the movie had to be released in December of 2019 other than that Disney/Lucasfilm wanted to release a film that year. It easily could have been given another year of development and people would have gone and seen it, because it’s Star Wars you morons. Of course it’s going to be a hit.

Hounded doesn’t even have a semblance of an excuse. It’s dumb.

I wouldn’t say that these victories don’t mean anything, because in Rise of Skywalker the death of a Satanic fascist lunatic and his armada is certainly something to be celebrated. On a world level, and on a Plot level, they’re very important. But it’s difficult to make it work on a character level when it’s not something the story has prepared the protagonist for. Yes, this film establishes that Rey has been trying to contact the Jedi masters of the past through the Force, but that’s barely touched on, and isn’t a continuous thread throughout the film. And it’s not as if she’s trying to tap into their power, like she does at the end because she needs to in order to match Palpatine.

Rey is an interesting and complex character! Make her final victory against Palps be actually about her and then you’re actually cooking with fire. The final battle then becomes not just the battle for the fate of the galaxy (which is important, sure, but on a narrative level it’s too big to really empathize with), but vital character development for our heroine. 

Final battles shouldn’t be decided by convenient power boosts. They should be character victories: something that shows that this individual’s strengths and how he or she has grown as a person over the course of the story, and his or her understanding of the villain.

And it sure as fudge shouldn’t be done the same way as Hounded does anything.

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